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M U S I C T H E O R Y O N L I N E
A Publication of the
Society for Music Theory
Copyright (c) 1996 Society for Music Theory
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| Volume 2, Number 3 March, 1996 ISSN: 1067-3040 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
All queries to: mto-editor@boethius.music.ucsb.edu or to
mto-manager@boethius.music.ucsb.edu
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AUTHOR: Castine, Peter
TITLE: Review of John Cage Symposium, Berlin, Germany, Nov. 23-25
KEYWORDS: Cage, Silence, Schoenberg, Black Mountain College, Boulez,
Stockhausen, Whoopee-Cushion
Peter Castine
Technical University of Berlin
Process Control Center (MA 073)
Strasse des 17. Juni 136
10629 Berlin, Germany
pcastine@prz.tu-berlin.de
ABSTRACT: The Institute for New Music of the Berlin College of the
Arts hosted a three-day conference on John Cage from November
23-25. The conference included concerts featuring Cage's
"Sonatas and Interludes" and a performance based on the "Song
Books." Papers read at the conference covered all aspects of
Cage, his music, and his aesthetics.
[1] The following review of the Cage Symposium held in Berlin
made its first appearance as a series of contributions to the
Silence mail list. These contributions were written in the lunch
and dinner breaks of the conference and posted immediately to the
mail list, in an effort to communicate the impressions made in
the most timely manner possible. However, it is hoped that the
spontaneity of reporting herein will be, in and of itself, of
value to *MTO* readers. For this reason, the review is submitted
substantially as originally presented, with only minor edits.
[2] Several comments made in the course of the conference
generated responses on the Silence mail list, and these are
referred to in footnotes. I wish to express my gratitude to all
those readers whose remarks have contributed to making this a
more accurate and informed review.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[3] Date: Thu, 23 Nov 1995 15:01 (MET). The most noticeable
difference between the recent Mills conference on Cage ("Here
comes everyone") and this week's activity is the weather--it's
cold and damp; the remains of last Sunday's snowstorm are still
everywhere to be seen. There was definitely a feeling that most
participants were just picking up where they had left off a week
ago in this morning's session.
[4] Not *quite* everybody came straight from Mills. Diether
Schnebel had been scheduled to speak, but his cancellation was
filled by Elmar Budde, who read from some of Schnebel's writings
on Cage. To my mind, this was the most interesting (although
already somewhat familiar) contribution, although for the
non-allemanophonic participants the content will have been
difficult to follow.
[5] Altogether, the linguistic demands on all participants are
non-trivial. Papers will be read in French, German, and English
(the last being in the majority). The conference organizer,
Martin Erdmann, stated at the beginning that there would *not* be
translations of paper abstracts from English into the regional
tongue, but after Deborah Campana's paper, requests from the
audience came to reverse the decision. We'll see how this goes in
the following days.
[6] Campana's paper was an extended repeat of her California
performance--that is, she read her Mills paper, followed by a
short discussion, coffee, and then a follow-up paper. The Silence
e-mail list was mentioned (Campana felt obliged to explain to the
local audience what a mail list is--she was probably well advised
in this regard, since the Internet is not as integral a part of
the German musicologist's life as it is for his or her American
colleague), referring to a discussion regarding the propriety of
using a Whoopee-Cushion in Cage's music (at which point, the
local audience wondered what a Whoopee-Cushion might be, so this
also required explication).
[7] I note that Campana used the word "improvisation" in
connection with performing Cage's music. This left me wondering
quite what she meant by the term, since following Cage's
instructions is something quite different from what is often
associated with the verb "to improvise." Otherwise, her talk was
peppered with anecdotes about "When I was with John at Urbana . . ."
and "Then John said to me . . . ." This will presumably come as no
surprise to those who witnessed the Mills conference.
[8] After some more coffee Martin Erdmann spoke about Cage's
*Chess Pieces*. I must confess that I was unfamiliar with these
works. After the talk, I still cannot *quite* imagine what the
pieces sound like, but hope to have an opportunity at some stage.
[9] Altogether, the morning struck me as skewed towards the
perspective of the musicologist rather than the performer. (This
feeling was heightened when the chair, after recognizing all
requests to speak by first name, took a question from Eberhard
Blum with "the gentleman in the back." Perhaps Blum is not so
well known outside of Germany, but the man has been performing
Cage extensively for two decades.)
----------------------------------------------------------------
[10] Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 15:23. Yesterday's afternoon
session consisted of two presentations from Berliners. I regret
having missed Rainer Cadenbach's talk,(1) but I was at least able
to hear Volker Straebel present his research on Cage's early
electroacoustic works. The variety of equipment Cage was able to
dig up at theaters and radio stations was impressive and
informative to those of us who started working with electronic
media later. Most of the equipment used for those early works has
disappeared from the face of this planet--how many readers have
seen a "Thunder Screen?"(2) (For that matter, it seemed no one in
the audience really knew what this object was or how it worked;
furthermore, there was little agreement on how to translate the
term into German, and only a fraction of the possible
translations of the word "screen" were suggested.)
==================================
1. Prof. Cadenbach was kind enough to provide me with the text
of his paper on the *String Quartet in Four Movements*. It
summarizes the piece's relation to contemporaneous works in
Cage's oeuvre, pointing out similarities and contrasts. In the
paper's second half, Cadenbach makes several analytical
observations regarding the composition, highlighting Cage's
methods of temporal structure and use of a limited vocabulary of
pitch structures, taking prior work by Erdmann and Campana as a
starting point for his examinations.
2. The device referred to was definitely not the traditional
Thunder Sheet, typically used in theater and opera to simulate
the sound of thunder. Straebel later clarified, in a message to
the Silence list, that it is not clear whether or not Cage
actually had opportunity to hear this device; however, Straebel
considers it probable that Cage would have at least seen it.
==================================
[11] This morning's session was chaired by Veniero Rizzardi,
substituting for Laura Kuhn. This was the session from Babel,
with Rosangela Pereira speaking in French, and the subsequent
discussion flip-flopping between French, German, and English at a
furious pace. Pereira's paper, "Le traversee du serialisme,"
defined serialism in a more general way than the typical
"extending dodecaphonic techniques to other parameters." My
understanding of Pereira is that serialism is primarily about
trying to structure parameters such as dynamics, density, etc.
*at all*. In this sense, Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen had, in
the '50s, perhaps more in common than is generally thought.
[12] One theme that came in both Pereira's and the following talk
by Andras Wilheim was the dichotomy of rigor versus liberty. Both
pointed out that a rigorous approach to composition and
performance was and is crucial to Cage's work. Wilheim's talk
("Performing scores: Cage's realizations") was a springboard for
a hearty discussion of the problems of authenticity in performing
Cage's music. Wilheim, of course, had numerous anecdotes to tell
on Cage revising (intentionally and unintentionally) scores
between performances, between publications, and between writing
score and extracting parts (or the other way around--Cage, did
not always follow the conventional order of writing short score,
fair score, and then parts). And some of the discussion revolved
around comments from yesterday regarding listening to "authentic"
performances, such as Tudor, while preparing one's own
performance of a Cage work. Eberhard Blum had an unequivocally
opposed this approach and insisted that the published score could
be the only basis for a performance. Wilheim, in his talk, flatly
contradicted this, and referred to numerous comments,
suggestions, and modifications Cage authorized while working with
performers such as Tudor (and, of course, Wilheim himself).
[13] What was interesting in all this discussion was, to my mind,
the parallels with discussions of Baroque (and other historical)
performance practice, and the extent to which an aural tradition
can, should, or must influence performance. The problems
discussed regarding Cage bear similarities to those concerning
Urtext editions of, say, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.(3)
==================================
3. The similarity in problems of determining historical
performance practice in Cage and Bach was also touched on in the
closing session.
==================================
[14] Finally, Mitchell Arnold reported his experiences in
preparing the world premiere of Cage's *108*. The difficulties
involved in this work (performers feeling that the lack of
convention in notation justifies an "anything goes" attitude)
reminded me of the scandals surrounding other Cage orchestral
works. (With a student orchestra, the response was not quite
enough to justify the word "scandal," and the performers at least
played the piece with some effort to do justice to the composer's
wishes.) This generated a useful discussion of whether Cage
should be performed by students at all, or the extent to which
one should even rehearse Cage.
[15] One tangent that came up both after Wilheim's and Arnold's
talks was the question of how far one can "arrange" a work by
Cage and still have a valid representation of the "original"
piece. One participant reported, as an example, performing one of
Earl Brown's graphic scores with a rock instrumentation. Is this
valid? Not surprisingly, opinions diverged. A gentleman addressed
as Mark pointed out that Cage was asked, on many occasions, for
his opinion on the appropriateness of a particular
instrumentation for various compositions, and that study of the
Cage correspondence shows there are no easy generalizations for
this question. Cage's replies covered the gamut from "anything is
OK in this piece" to a flat "No," and the suspicion remains that
in some cases Cage's response might have been different a decade,
a year, or even a day later.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[16] Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 19:32. Laura Kuhn's paper, "Cage's
algorithmic aesthetics: anticipating CD-ROM," was read in
abstentia. The title is reminiscent of her Mills presentation.
The idea that Cage's thinking would take advantage of new
technologies is, in and of itself, hardly surprising: his is
among the earliest (if not, indeed, *the* earliest) work in
electroacoustic music. However, Cage wasn't always the first to
be involved with every technology: it seems that Paik was the
video visionary. But the point that bothered me about Kuhn's
paper was the thesis that Cage's aesthetics desired a "passive
listener" or "passive audience." If this were the case, why did
he include those computer printouts in the Nonesuch recording of
HPSCHD--the ones where the listener was supposed to adjust volume
and balance settings every ten seconds while listening to the
piece? Perhaps Kuhn has a definition of "passive" that fits in
with this, and other statements Cage made that seem to support a
concept of listening as an *active* experience, but it escapes
me.
[17] Obviously, technology is already available to support the
sort of musical production Kuhn was suggesting in her paper:
things like real-time mixing of multiple tracks. Kuhn envisioned
(among other possibilities) a CD-ROM of, say, the individual
parts of *108* recorded to individual tracks, mixed together on the
fly in accordance with Cage's score, providing a new
"performance" every time it is played back. Nevertheless, one
wonders if Cage would not have had other ideas for this sort of
technology. There is certainly something special about having a
whole orchestra up on stage, and re-mixing a recording is not the
same as a new performance.(4)
==================================
4. The original report to the Silence list also questioned if
consumer technology, as opposed to specialized products such as
Pro Tools and AudioMedia, was likely to *ever* provide the sort
of mixing facilities Kuhn was suggesting. Stephen Smoliar pointed
out, quite rightly, that this sort of thing is already available
on some multimedia CD-ROM productions.
==================================
[18] Paul van Emmerik reiterated an idea Rosangela Pereira spoke
on this morning, proposing a broader definition of serialism that
gets Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen into the same boat. His
suggestion (reflected in the paper title) that this was a sort of
"creolization of serialism" led to some "lively" debate about
what the word creolization implies (when two cultures or
languages meet in a creolization process, is one in some way
superior to the other?). The ideas presented seemed in many ways
excessively Eurocentric (as if Cage's first trip to Europe was
the only really influential period of his life, and van Emmerik's
claim that Cage's 25-tone pieces were influenced by Schoenberg's
12-tone music is not one this author would like to defend).
Finally, as Jolyon Brettingham-Smith pointed out during the
discussion, Cage's influences came from both East and West of the
U.S., which is something of a spanner in the "meeting of two
cultures" argument.
[19] Still, van Emmerik's point that the Boulez/Cage
correspondence indicates that Cage's "chessboard-like"
arrangements of musical materials were a springboard for Boulez's
serial matrices is worth knowing, even if it is perhaps not a new
insight.
-----------------------------------------------------------
[20] Date: Sat, 25 Nov 1995 14:52. Paul Rey Klecka's
performance of "Sonatas and Interludes" last night can best be
described as cozy. The Kammermusiksaal at the College of the Arts
was full to the brim, but it was Klecka's easy-going chatting
with the audience that gave the concert its atmosphere. Klecka's
performance was remarkable for two reasons: he began with playing
the first sonata, then interrupted his performance to explain to
the audience (most of whom were not present during the symposium
proper and who were not necessarily familiar with the
composition) what a prepared piano was, the difficulties in the
measurements, and the overall structure of the music. He also
announced an intermission after the end of the first half of the
piece (that is, after the second Interlude). I do not know if
this counts as "authorized" performance practice, but dividing
the 70-minute performance into two halves alleviates some of the
danger of a performance becoming tedious. Klecka also gave us an
encore, "Totem Ancestor," another early Cage work for prepared
piano, characterized by ostenati and rhythmic repetitions; short
and sweet.
[21] This morning's session began with a talk by David Patterson
on Cage at Black Mountain College. This contained considerable
valuable information on who was there when, and how the various
parties interacted (during Cage's first stay the "official" music
professor was Erwin Bodky, who was focusing on the Beethoven
piano sonatas--this configuration was bound to bring out Cage's
most provocative statements on the grosse Meister, leading to
some hefty confrontations, in some reports culminating in a food
fight in the dining hall.)
[22] Speaking of food fights, reports apparently differ
considerably as to what exactly did take place, and this lack of
definitive history seems characteristic of the entire Black
Mountain experience. Patterson extracted from several
descriptions of the 1952 happening, often referred to as *Theater
Piece no. 1*. While there are a few points of agreement, details
from different reports are contradictory (Cage was elevated, but
whether on a podium, a ladder, or other platform is under debate;
films were shown, but whether only abstract images or pictures of
the cafeteria chef were visible depends on who you ask).
----------------------------------------------------------------
[23] Date: Sun, 26 Nov 1995 17:46. Saturday morning's session
continued with Doerte Schmidt. Her paper's title, "Die Geburt des
Flugzeugs: Cage, I Ging und C.G. Jung" was a reference to a
Buckminster Fuller quote Cage was fond of (and one that serves to
remind us that Cage was influenced by both European *and* Asian
sources). Schmidt made the point that Cage was aware of the I Ching
considerably before the beginning of the '50s, having first come
across this book as early as the '30s in the San Francisco
public library. The point is worth making, since some of Cage's
anecdotes leave us with the impression that it was Suzuki who
brought him to this book, although Suzuki didn't arrive in the US
until 1950 and his teaching at Columbia began the following year.
[24] It is probably fair enough to credit Suzuki with being an
important factor in Cage's development towards the I Ching and
chance. Perhaps even the decisive factor. The '36 encounter was
probably seminal, and the seed took many years to sprout. As
important as Suzuki's influence may have been, some of Cage's
work that shows increased interest in indeterminacy predates the
time of the Suzuki lectures.
[25] Schmidt's lecture also dealt with any influence C.G. Jung
and Jungian analysis may have had on Cage. No one seemed able to
definitively say whether or not Cage underwent analysis. Cage, of
course, says in *Silence* "I never underwent analysis," but in
another anecdote tells of speaking with a psychiatrist. Cage's
statement that Zen replaced psychoanalysis seems to imply some
contact with a psychiatrist's couch. The period just after the
war, coinciding with Cage's divorce and, apparently, other
personal and professional difficulties, seems to be a chapter
where Cage (and other sources) leave us a little in the dark as
to what really went on.
[26] The discussion could not fail to talk about Cage's use of I
Ching as a very particular form of chance that has a foundation
beyond simply "choosing random numbers." The dichotomy of
causality versus synchronicity (according to Schmidt, introduced
by Jung) also reared its head in the discussion.
[27] The morning ended with a paper presented by Sabine Sanio, a
doctoral candidate at the FU Berlin writing a dissertation on
Cage. The hall was packed and overflowing by now, with the
distribution of native to non-native listeners changing
dramatically in favor of German-speakers. A few hardy anglophones
did stay to listen to a paper entitled "Die Paradoxie der
Unbestimmtheit" with a subtitle that can be translated as
"Some thoughts on Cage's terminology."
[28] The most obvious paradox Sanio refers to is the difference
between Cage's musical work of the '50s and his texts of the same
period (Lecture on Nothing, Lecture on Something, and other "text
compositions" [Sanio's term]). Indeterminacy functions in the
music as a means of dissolving (or negating) conventional sorts
of musical meaning or "semantics"; the texts, although highly
unconventional in their use of semantics, have an unmistakable
semantic intent. The terms Sanio used include "Sinnzusammenhang"
and "Kommunikation." (However, one wonders if we should perhaps
be distinguishing between semantics and pragmatics in this
discussion--Sanio is certainly aware of this distinction in
linguistic usage, but it did not come out in her talk.)
[29] In the afternoon, Veniero Rizzardi spoke on "Some specific
episodes of Cage's European reception." He threatened to get
quite specific in deed, first limiting Europe to Italy, then
limiting the time frame to the years 1958-60. Rizzardi did, in
the end, go a bit beyond this focus (he mentioned Nono, Berio,
Evangelisti, Eco, and Donatoni, but also Cardew, Adorno, Metzger,
and several German towns well known to the musical avant garde).
The point of using the above focus was to highlight the time when
Cage's influence in Italy was at its most positive. Cage had, of
course, been in Italy prior to that. It was at the end of the '50s
that Cage's ideas about indeterminacy found significant resonance
among the Italian (and much of the rest of the European) avant
garde. Cage's relation to Nono seems to have been most
enlightening, with the two having considerable contact, up to
Cage's (infamous) lectures in Darmstadt. After this, there was a
falling out between the two composers (although less charged than
the break between Cage and Boulez), coinciding with Nono's own
contribution to the same issue of the *Darmstaedter Beitraege zur
neuen Musik*.
[30] In the following discussion, the question of the authorship
of Nono's paper came up (Lachenmann, who was studying with Nono
at the time, has lodged a claim to authorship; Lachenmann is not
likely to have made this claim lightly and is a generally
reliable source, but there seems to be no other evidence than his
word) as well as the question of who Nono's true target was, Cage
or Stockhausen. There is also a question of whether Stockhausen
had a hand in editing the published text.
[31] After 1960, Cage retained influence as a point of reference
for Italian composers, including discussion about the idea of
open form, but Cage's presence was primarily as a negative
influence ("don't do what Cage did"). We had some entertaining
quotes, notably from Umberto Eco, which caused some strain on the
chair in attempting to maintain his composure. The audience had
no compunction about giggling through this.
[32] Saturday put musicologists back squarely as the focus of
this conference, and this was most noticeable in the closing
discussion, by which time attendance had thinned out
considerably. A portion of the discussion circled around an
hypothesis proposed by Rainer Cadenbach, that Cage research in
Europe seemed more interested in questions of aesthetics, whereas
American research was more concerned with Cage's personality.
There was agreement that this is not an absolute dichotomy, but
that there were some tendencies that supported this notion.
[33] In this context there was also a question about Cage
research and reception in Asia. Cage's presence has been felt in
Asia (particularly Japan), and there is work being done there.
While Berlin is about as far from Japan as one can get
geographically, it was reported that Asian research was equally
underrepresented at Mills. One can only hope that the next Cage
conference, wherever it may be, can address this imbalance.
[34] There was also some discussion of various Cage anecdotes and
their historical accuracy. Cage had claimed never to have seen
Schoenberg again after his studies, whereas a member of
Schoenberg's family recalls, apparently with great clarity, Cage
demonstrating piano preparation for his former teacher.
Additionally, the remark attributed to Schoenberg, that Cage was
not a composer but "an inventor of genius," now seems to be of
dubious origin(5) (although Cage may well have been dealing in
good faith when he quoted this).
==================================
5. The source of this statement is Peter Yates; there is no
independent confirmation that Schoenberg ever said anything
like this.
==================================
[35] The closing concert was a performance by the Berlin
ensemble, Die Maulwerker, of a "Concert for Voices, Piano and
Five Instruments (1958/70)." This was a simultaneous performance
of extracts from *Song Books* and the *Concert for Piano and
Orchestra*. Die Maulwerker are an ensemble with a 17-year history,
originally founded by Diether Schnebel. Their first performance
was, not surprisingly, Schnebel's *Maulwerk*, but since then they
have collectively developed considerable experience in performing
works by Cage.
[36] Saturday night's excellent performance was scored for piano,
flute, clarinet, violin, and two 'celli, and voice (all
instrumentalists except the pianist doubled with vocal
performance). Reporting is difficult, but those who have
experienced other performances may recognize some of the "songs."
Among these was that old favorite, "The best form of government
is no government at all" (with an excitedly waved black flag),
the folding of towels, two recipes, and "Nitchy, nitchy,
collaconitchy!" shouted at us, first 62, then another 63 times.
Of course, various other grumbles, moans, and humming as well as
some simple tunes (the final three-note melody, ending with the
word persimmon, had a surprising feeling of reprise for this
listener), accompanied throughout by a quiet, 50 Hz hum on the
lines to the loudspeakers (after due consideration I realized
this was a deliberate contribution from diffusion engineer,
Martin Supper).
[37] The venue was packed and overflowing for the entire 70
minutes of the performance. A memorable experience.
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